Surprisingly restrained considering my afternoon(s) spent in Kinokuniya in Sydney.

• Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
• The Adventures of Tintin: The Black Island by Hergé
• The Adventures of Tintin: The Crab with the Golden Claws by Hergé
• The Adventures of Tintin: King Ottokar’s Sceptre by Hergé
• The Adventures of Tintin: The Shooting Star by Hergé
• QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
• Fresh Apples by Rachel Trezise
• Girl With Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace

Marginalia

I’ve had an amazing week. Words cannot even begin to express just how great it has been. I saw my favourite band the Manic Street Preachers for the first and second time, met them after both shows, and got a photo with Nicky Wire and James Dean Bradfield. This is a band that has shaped, influenced, changed, and inspired me for over twelve years, so this week was pretty damn important to me and they didn’t let me down. I was on the barrier for both shows, right up the front, screaming and singing my little lungs out. Amazing. And, to have the band be so gracious and attentive to their fans was just a bonus. Meeting fellow fans has also been an encouraging experience.

So, as it was, I didn’t exactly spend much time worrying about blogging. The only conclusion that I’ve managed to reach is that I want to continue writing about books and reading with enthusiasm and sincerity. Posting is going to continue being slightly irregular while I try and “figure things out.” Trust me, I am cringing as I write that. It sounds like the “it’s not you, it’s me” of book blogging.

• All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
• Howards End by E. M. Forster
• My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin
• Where You Find It by Janice Galloway
• Island by Aldous Huxley
• Setting Free the Bears by John Irving
• The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer
• Chickenhawk by Robert Mason
• Harold Pinter: Plays Volume Three by Harold Pinter
• Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck
• The Pearl by John Steinbeck

Over the past year or so I’ve become more inclined to buy new/remaindered books, mainly thanks to a.) working in a remainder bookstore, b.) working in a “normal” bookstore and c.) The Book Depository. When I was younger, and even sometimes now, I bought a lot of second hand books. What I love about them is thinking about the journey they’ve taken to end up in a particular store. How did a Vintage Classics copy of Aldous Huxley’s Island bought in Indonesia for 40 000 RP end up for sale for $2 in a suburban Salvation Army store? Why did someone buy Volume 3 of Harold Pinter’s plays from Monash University bookstore and how did it end up unread in a second hand bookstore by the train station? What was originally in the envelope in All the President’s Men that was then used as a bookmark, forgotten about at page 42? I like to think about these stories, in addition to those contained within the text.

This week I was also suffering from what I not so fondly refer to as perma-headache. Not quite as intense as a migraine, but painful enough to be constantly aware of the throbbing pain in my head. Very annoying. And in my birthday week as well! There were some exciting things happening despite perma-headache. My favourite band, Manic Street Preachers, who I’ve loved since my early teens, announced their first Australian tour in ELEVEN YEARS! This means I’m currently planning another trip to Sydney to see them play in two capital cities in November. I’d been looking for an excuse to visit Sydney again after going there (again, for a band) in March, and this is the perfect reason. There’ll be more about this band in tomorrow’s review, as the tour was not only announced on my birthday but while I was reading a biography about them. Pretty amazing coincidence.

This week Bret Easton Ellis was in town, and I went and saw him interviewed at the Athenaeum Theatre on Friday night. It was such a great night, Ellis was in top form, funny and irreverent. I met him briefly afterwards, he signed a couple of my books (including the battered copy of Less Than Zero I’ve been reading and rereading since I was sixteen) and posed for a few photos with me. I look insanely happy. He was very lovely, chatty and warm. When my sister accidentally took a photo of us while he was looking away he insisted that she retake it as he wanted to be looking at the camera. While I don’t really get the whole book signing thing, I’m very happy that I got to meet him.

I read Imperial Bedrooms this week, and I’m not going to review it for the blog. It was difficult to get out of review mindset and just read for pleasure, to really immerse myself in the book and enjoy it – that’s not to say that I don’t enjoy the books I do review but it’s a completely different approach to read without that critical distance. Does that make sense? I’m sure that I’ll be rereading it in the future and then I will write up my thoughts on it, but for now I was really pleased to just read the latest book from one of my favourite authors. Heh, maybe some time in the future someone will pick up my signed copy of Imperial Bedrooms and wonder who Jess was and why the book ended up in a second hand bookstore.

• The Signet Classic Book of Southern Short Stories edited by Dorothy Abbott and Susan Koppelman
• The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli
• Everything: A Book About Manic Street Preachers by Simon Price
• The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington

A few months after purchasing it on ebay, The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald finally arrived. I’d accepted that it had probably been lost in the post, and emailed the seller who was on holiday at the time. When they returned from their trip they told me that the book had been sent back to them as my address had been rubbed off the package! Very pleased that it wasn’t the victim of some sort of postal conspiracy.

This is the 52nd Book Loot post, which means that Start Narrative Here has been around for almost a year! (And I don’t even want to think about just how many books have been amassed in that time.) My first review was posted on a wordpress hosted site on the 11th of August, 2009 – and I decided that I wanted my own space and bought the domain a week later on the 18th of August, 2009. Starting a book blog was a project aimed at learning to express myself again after a really horrible year, and it has quickly become much more than just a nerdy recovery method. It has reinvigorated and reaffirmed my love of the written word. To anyone that has commented, read, recommended, emailed or even lurked over the past year, thank you so much.

Image from tumblr.

• Lilian’s Story by Kate Grenville
• A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
• One Day by David Nicholls
• Expiration Date by Duane Swierczynski
• Generation of Swine: The Gonzo Papers Volume 2 by Hunter S. Thompson
• The Great Shark Hunt: The Gonzo Papers Volume 1 by Hunter S. Thompson
• Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness by Hunter S. Thompson
• The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells

Two of these (Lilian’s Story and One Day) were won from various online competitions. I’ve been having such good luck in book related competitions, I wonder whether that luck would translate should I buy a lottery ticket? After watching Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson the other week I was inspired to fill in the gaps in my Thompson library, and the Simon & Schuster editions are so much more pleasant looking than the unbearably ugly MacMillan reissues.

The unstoppable Amanda from Desert Book Chick sent me Expiration Date, and it looks like a mind-meltingly awesome read, you can read her review of it here. August is Classics month over on her blog, and when I stop running my hands lovingly over my Penguin Classics and Modern Library editions and I’ll be writing a guest post for her about reading the classics. It’ll be my first guest post and I’m pretty excited about it.

This week I had to press the “MARK ALL AS READ” button on my book news folder as it got way too unmanageable in the time I spent away from the computer, so this Book Loot is sadly lacking the usual list of fascinating tidbits from the literary world. I’ve been busy with Melbourne International Film Festival screenings, but the past week looks mild compared to the crazy schedule I’ve prepared for myself this week. I’m most looking forward to The Killer Inside Me (I have the book on hold, and would have read it by now too if only some dastardly creature hadn’t kept it for three weeks past the due date.), Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam (and I have the book that inspired this documentary on hold as well) and the newest film from one of my favourites, Harmony Korine, Trash Humpers – and yes, it is what it sounds like.

I’ve also (finally) decided to put up the Google Friend Connect widget, and although my loner tendencies like that it’s just me there at the moment, if any of you would care to join me over there, it is sure to be one hell of a party!

Image: a very young Hunter S. Thompson, via tumblr.

• Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl

This one was a freebie that I received for signing up to Penguin’s Young Adult newsletter Between the Lines. Pretty rad eh? You can still sign up and receive a free book, but it is open to Australian residents only. Now, there’s a phrase you don’t see very often on book blogs!

This week at the very last minute I decided to buy a minipass for the Melbourne International Film Festival. I was a cinema studies student for five long years after all! Originally I had only planned to go to a couple of sessions, but that very quickly turned into a few more sessions and in the end it was cheaper to buy the pass. I’m going to see lots of documentaries, a couple of new films from old favourites and some films picked at random. It’s a great time of year to be in Melbourne, after the film festival ends it’s not long until the Bret Easton Ellis event, and then after that, the Melbourne Writer’s Festival begins! City of Literature? City of Awesome.

• William Kostakis takes on Alexandra Adornetto‘s recent “wah real boys pale in comparison to Edward Cullen wah” article. You must read this.
• I like this list of Books Behind Bars: The Best Prison Literature from AbeBooks.
• I am coveting the new collection of Jack Kerouac & Allen Ginsberg’s correspondence (I’m thinking it will be my birthday present to myself!) and Janet Maslin gives us a nice summary of the letters and another book about the Beats due out soon.
• People have been sending in pictures of their piles of books to be read and reviewed.
• You probably saw this during the week, but it deserves another mention: One star Amazon reviews of Time’s 100 Best Novels from 1923.
• Marisa Meltzer asks: Where are the Darias in contemporary pop culture?
• The Definitive Mad Men Summer Reading List. Anyone who spoils the upcoming season four of the series for me will be on the receiving end of some very stern looks.
• Eight Literary Works That Deserve a Graphic Novel Treatment – is this the new film adaptation?
• Continuing with the previous item and the Beats, Ginsberg’s Howl has been adapted into a graphic novel version just in time for the release of the movie.

Image Credit: Good Friends (Berta and Capi) by Albert Edelfelt, 1882.

• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

I won To the Lighthouse through a twitter competition Penguin Australia ran to promote their new range of Popular Penguins. It doesn’t get any more exciting than free books, does it?

Think again friends. Do you remember the three hundred times I raved about the Bob in Space bookmark from the Book Depository bookmark competition winners? And how I constantly lamented the fact that I never seemed to receive it? Well, guess what bookmark arrived with my July 2010-December 2011 Moleskine planner?

You’re damn right it was the Bob in Space bookmark.

While I sit here content that my life can be made that much brighter by a simple bookmark and planning jam packed days at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival, here are some links to peruse:

• This one is from a few years back but it’s still a good one: A mix tape of songs about books.
• Allen Ginsberg’s Howl adapted for the online hipster generation: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3am, surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams”
• How about taking a Tintin themed holiday?
• Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander (my high school favourite) and Paint It Black offers her ten rules for writers.
• On the rise of the literary night out.
• Speaking of literary nights out, this week I went and saw Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson at the State Library of Victoria and when doing some research afterward, came across Gonzo: A Graphic Biography of Hunter S. Thompson which is due out in October. Could be worth a look.
• The Book Inscriptions Project collects, well, inscriptions found  in books: the personal, the mundane, the heartfelt.
• And finally, inspired by the Eat Pray Love film tie in perfumes The New Yorker‘s Book Bench comes up with a list of perfumes based on novels.

Thankfully I have these new books to keep me company:

• Cocaine Nights by J.G. Ballard
• Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard
• The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard
• Millenium People by J.G. Ballard
• Super-Cannes by J.G. Ballard
• If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black
• Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

In lieu of an array of fantastically interesting links, though I do recommend reading Flavorwire’s list of the 20th Century’s most reclusive authors, I’m going to tell you a story!

I had an interesting encounter with some young readers yesterday. Tired after a long day, I was listening to my ipod but the battery ran out, so I pulled a book out of my bag and started reading that instead. Soon after I did the conversation of the group of teenagers moved toward what they’d been reading. I really loved secretly listening to them talking about books, and convinced myself that it was me that caused the change of topic. Who knows.

So what are teens (male and female) in the North-West of Melbourne reading on their school holidays? A few of the titles that I caught were Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher (and they were very insistent about how great it is, reading up on it now it sounds like something I’d be interested in. Anyone read it?), Gone by Michael Grant, Inkheart by Cornelia Funke and The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. I couldn’t help but grin to myself when I heard them talking about The Outsiders. No vampires!

• The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy
• Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell

Keep the Aspidistra Flying – man takes a job in a bookshop but his poverty ends up destroying his creativity and his spirit – sounds like it has the potential to hit a little too close to home. Just kidding, I’m pretty sure my creativity & spirit were broken long before I started working in bookstores. Ah, don’t mind me, it’s just been one of those weeks.

Speaking of bookstores, every single store that sends me an email newsletter seems to be having big end of financial year sales over the next couple of weeks. Lots of very tempting emails about 50%/20% off all stock which are very difficult to ignore. There should be some sort of way to filter such emails, preferably according to my bank balance!

• A positive take on how the combination of technology and reading may be beneficial to culture and society from Steven Johnson’s article “Yes, People Still Read, but Now It’s Social” at The New York Times.
• Jacinda Woodhead considers the cultural significance of the library over at the Meanland blog.
• A brilliant rebuttal to the tired claim that fiction is dead.
• Listverse‘s Top 10 Fictional Male Charmers, a majority of them literary.
• The 15 Coolest Bookends. The Sandman and Star Wars cantina bookends would make great conversation pieces.
• The appeal of book blogs – with the very conservative estimate of the number of book blogs: just 300?!

I did, when digging through our review proof corner during a quiet moment at work, find a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s upcoming Freedom and took it home with me. I was only flicking through it – I’m a pretty strict one book at a time kind of woman – and ending up reading the first 30 pages. And those 30 pages were really good. Have I told you the story about how I found a torn ten dollar note in a $3 copy of The Corrections at Clunes this year? Everyone laughed when I told them you could take fragments of notes to the bank and they would exchange it for the equivalent amount of cash, but I was right. So really, I bought The Corrections and made a profit. And I’m very much looking forward to reading Freedom.

The reading monkey to the left there is a present my Dad bought for me a few weeks ago because it reminded him of me (!). Look at how into his book he is.

This week’s Book Loot links would be a lot longer if I hadn’t been so distracted by vuvuzelas and vuvuzela internet memes during the week:

• I’m not a fan of that sparkly vampire series, but this piece on how Forks, Washington is using the series to capitalize on the newfound tourist trade is interesting. Erm, a Bella burger? No thanks. I hope it’s cooked rare.
• If that gets you in the mood for travelling to literary locations, you could always have a browse through the 100 Most Celebrated Travel Books.
• On the addictive nature of buying First Editions.
• Or, you could always spend your spare change on one of these literary letters up for auction.
• A new way to randomly browse the Millions archives of book reviews was launched this week.

• Kingdom Come by J.G. Ballard
• The Philosophy of Andy Warhol by Andy Warhol

And, I was lucky enough to have a kindly someone slip a bookmark with one of the Book Depository bookmark competition winning designs into Kingdom Come. Not my favourite one: “Bob was so stuck into his book he didn’t realize he was in SPACE” but a very cute bookmark nonetheless. I guess I’ll just have to keep buying more books until I get the Bob in Space bookmark.

This week I renewed the startnarrativehere.com domain for another two years, so it looks like I’m going to be around for little while longer. Speaking of which, my one year anniversary is coming up … I wonder what I’ll do to celebrate? (No, seriously. Any ideas?)

Until then,

• Listverse lists the Top 10 Difficult Literary Works. I’ve only read 1/10 – T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land – hooray for first year Literature university courses!  (Listverse is easily of my favourite non-book related websites, I spend so much time here and have way too many random “no one cares Jess” facts from reading their various lists.)
• Even though I too favour marginalia and such in physical books versus the cold, hard plastic of e-readers sometimes I wonder whether it is just the old “But physical album art is so important for the experience of music!” argument rehashed for the literature crowd. In the latest bit of heartwarming reportage, a man tracks down and reconnects with an old friend after finding a bunch of old books in a second hand bookstore with the friend’s ex-libris sticker inside.
• More John Waters promotional articles as Role Models is released, The New Yorker recounts a recent event with Waters:

“I love feel-bad books,” Waters said, perched cross-legged on the edge of a couch. “I want to have a hate book club where we all come over and read about hateful characters.”

• And The New York Times reviews Role Models, calling him America’s “best funny uncle.”
• The Washington Post has a great article with lists of the top 10 best selling books for the years 1990, 1980, 1970 and so on, down to 1910. Even though they don’t cover whole decades, just the first year of each decade, it’s surprising how many of the previously best selling books are now probably forgotten. I wonder how many of them are even still in print?
• Chip O’Brien over at Forbes‘ Booked blog has a few words about what book publishers can learn from the film and music industries.
• J.G. Ballard’s archives have been acquired by the British Library.
• This photography slideshow – titled “Remember reading on Paper?” as though the act itself is already obsolete – showcases some lovely photos of grand libraries and private images of people reading.
• John Feffer has been reading books he bought from a book sale as a teenager.
• Summer has started for those in the Northern Hemisphere (and we’re just beginning to get a real taste for Winter down South), and here is a complete compilation of all the Summer 2010 Reading lists that have been published so far. Just in case you needed something else to read.
• I know I linked to it last week, and I’ve also spent a lot of time this week pimping it out to as many sources as possible but I have really high hopes for the Australian Book Bloggers Directory. Be sure to spread the word, and join up if you haven’t already.

• The Savage God: A Study of Suicide by A. Alvarez
• This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness by Erich Fromm
• Letters to Milena by Franz Kafka (edited by Willy Haas)
• The Divided Self by R.D. Laing
• Knots by R.D. Laing
• The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise by R.D. Laing
• The Politics of Family by R.D. Laing
• Sanity, Madness and the Family by R.D. Laing and A. Esterson
• Collected Poems by Philip Larkin
• Kerouac and Friends: A Beat Generation Album by Fred W. McDarrah & Timothy S. McDarrah
• The Complete Plays by Joe Orton
• The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life by Richard Sennett
• The Silent Twins by Marjorie Wallace

With the Larkin so-called Collected Poems I really should have done some research before buying this edition. The edition I worshipped at the university library was much thicker than the one I received which confused me, and some cursory research revealed that the earlier edition contains much more of Larkin’s unpublished, uncollected and juvenile poetry. Whereas my edition contains his four main poetry books, and a handful of uncollected poetry – all kept in Larkin’s own ordering for his poems rather than chronological. I know there are some poems in the earlier edition which are necessary, so it looks like I’ll be hunting down a copy of the earlier edition as well. I can’t help but feel that Larkin deserves a better treatment but I am a completist.

Links!:

• Driven to Distraction: Cate Kennedy on the internet and the writing life is now online at Overland. When there were excerpts posted online a few months ago, I was totally adamant that she had things utterly wrong, but the full article is a lot more persuasive, the argument fleshed out more than the “controversial” soundbites listed in mainstream newspapers.
• There is now an Australian Book Blogger Directory. Hopefully this will become a really useful resource, I wonder if this means we are a step closer to seeing an Australian Book Blogger Convention?
• I have such a crush on this post from My Girl Friday. Steph has made polyvore sets for characters from young adult novels, and the results are so fantastic and creative! I might be awed because I have a complete lack of fashion sense, black goes with black right? I’m one of those Melbournians with a monochromatic wardrobe.

• Bernice Bobs Her Hair and Other Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald

This week’s loot links, other than this thorough feminist reading list, are all videos:

• Dale Campisi from Arcade Publications talks about E.W. Cole (you can read my review of the book he’s discussing, Lisa Lang’s E.W. Cole: Chasing the Rainbow here) and what independent booksellers can learn from Cole’s approach to bookselling. I might use this video to convince my boss that our book store really needs a monkey enclosure.
• Are you ready for the self-referential joy that is this youtube video? Here is Andrew McCarthy reviewing Bret Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms. “What? What do I care what Blane from Pretty in Pink cares about a book?!” There was a film version of Less Than Zero and Andrew McCarthy played the lead character, Clay. Imperial Bedrooms is a sequel to the original novel Less Than Zero, which opens with a discussion of the film version of their lives from the perspective of Clay, AND Andrew McCarthy is the narrator of the Imperial Bedrooms audiobook. This might just be a cleverly self-aware, effective bit of marketing hype, but I kind of love it.
• And finally, the dulcet tones of Damon Albarn reading Fantastic Mr. Fox.

• Book recommendations from Yoko Ono anyone?
• Oh my, the MS Readathon for adults in the form of the Novel Challenge.
• Read the first two chapters of Chuck Palahniuk‘s new novel Tell-All on the A.V. Club.
• I’m sure everyone and their dog saw this during the week, but I’m going to link to it anyway: Ghostbusters recreated by an improv group in the New York Public Library’s main reading room.
• I’ve just finished reading Rachel Trezise’s latest novel Sixteen Shades of Crazy, and at The Guardian she offers her top 10 Welsh underground novels.
• Book spotting in Williamsburg‘s McCarren Park.
• Thanks to the eagle-eyed Steph from My Girl Friday: John Waters talks about six of his favourite books, suicides in the entertainment and speed-freak memoirs included.
• The new Bret Easton Ellis web site is pretty ace, including a length excerpt from Imperial Bedrooms – Clay analyzes how the novel written about them was adapted into a lacklustre movie (!), and reveals how one major character is murdered.
• And more Bret Easton Ellis with a series of interviews from Movieline about the film adaptations of his novels: On Less Than Zero, on American Psycho, on The Rules of Attraction, on The Informers, and on his future film project The Golden Suicides.
• The Columbus State University’s Carson McCullers Center had a Carson themed feast at the beginning of May. New project? I still haven’t gotten around to making ‘Spuds Carson’ as discussed in Illumination & Night Glare.
• You all probably heard the “news” that Carson McCullers is Robert Pattinson’s favourite writer, yeah? He recently gave Oprah a copy of The Ballad of the Sad Café. I respectfully decline to comment.
• And, just in case you need a laugh and a reason to never have children: Shit My Kids Ruined.

Photo credit: Ernest Hemingway poses with a water buffalo while on safari in Africa, 1953-1954. Photograph in the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston.

• On Wine and Hashish by Charles Baudelaire

Was it just me, or was there an overwhelming amount of good articles to be found on the interwebs this week?

• A brief exploration from cover designers as to why book covers differ according to national markets.
• An interview with C. Max Magee, the founding editor of The Millions.
• And speaking of which, this article on The Millions about the rush of hipster books based on tumblr blogs – including Look at this Fucking Hipster and Stuff Hipsters Hate- names and shames Melbourne, Australia as one of the world’s hipster havens. Not going to argue with that. I am still waiting for the perfect moment to capture a photo of my dog for the upcoming Hipster Puppies book. What?!
• Um, I don’t have any publishable comment about this one, I’ll just let you make the call yourselves: people are supposedly naming babies after Twilight characters.
• Oh dude, I’m linking to the Millions again, but this article is too good not to share: on the joy of unread books.
• Looks like Christos Tsiolkas is on the verge of hitting it big overseas, “on the literary rock-star track” says the Times who interviewed him recently. I wonder if The Slap will be as massively successful overseas as it was here?
• I really love this look at the notes, ephemera and scribbles found in a pile of abandoned books, a.k.a. things a Kindle/Nook/iPad/ereader will never be able to reproduce.
• Chuck Klosterman’s newest project is a set of cards – Hypertheticals: 50 Questions for Insane Conversations – designed to inspire debate and conversation.
• It’s official – the internet could be making you happier.
• An eye-opening and somewhat alarming look at the cost of running an independent bookstore.
• A book bike that gives away free books and reading materials to everyone, very cool that he is using it to support independent bookstores.
• A cigarette vending machine in Hamburg now a book vending machine.
• Lesley Glaister’s top 10 books about incarceration from the Guardian.
• A series of toad sculptures are to be placed around the city of Hull to honour the 25th anniversay of Philip Larkin’s death. Not only is Larkin one of my favourite poets, but we share the same birth date. Exciting!
• This interview from Vice magazine (I know…but trust me on this one) with Bret Easton Ellis is amazing. He drops a few spoilers about Imperial Bedrooms, and my anticipation for this novel is reaching fever pitch. Did I mention here that he’ll be in Melbourne in my birthday week too? I’m salivating.
• A short and sweet interview with my hero John Waters about his reading habits and his book collection, made up of at least (!) 8,425 books. Also this quote explains why I love him so:

I collect shocking titles — “Sex on Horseback,’’ “Roughneck River,’’ “Convict Lust,’’ “Stars and Their Pets.’’ My most shocking books I put in the guest room, so people don’t stay real long.

Photo Credit: Natalie Wood, from the Women Reading tumblr.

• The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Lost Decade by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Pat Hobby Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

And, a whole bunch of links of good reading for you all.

• Did you know that there is no historical marker in the house in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where Carson McCullers wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter?
• A look at Mad Men‘s Don Draper’s bookshelf.
• On the Meaning of Making Time to Read by Nymeth from Things Mean A Lot.
• A visit to Carson McCullers’ childhood home in Columbus.
• On books and reading – how the very act of reading must be considered before we can adequately engage in a discussion of “the future of fiction”; some interesting thoughts on the agency of reading as well.
• Chuck Palahniuk on reading Judy Blume and his latest novel Tell-All.
• The 1996 Details profile of David Foster Wallace; that the author of the article couldn’t easily access the profile online speaks volumes about how far digitization still has to go.
• Truth: I was that creepy kid at high school that spent lunchtimes in the library reading true crime. Here’s a short list of the best true crime books.
• This isn’t book related at all, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless. Phillipe Halsman was a photographer in the 1950s and would ask his subjects to “jump” for a photo.
• I’m almost finished with my last Nathanael West novel, and The New York Times published a review of a new biography of him and his wife, Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney by Marion Meade.
• Ben Myers is releasing a fictional account of the life of missing pop lyricist Richey Edwards – a profound influence on my teenage self – in October, Richard: A Novel. The cover looks good, but the blurb seems a bit underwhelming, I mean:  “one man’s battle with his worst enemy. Himself.” Hopefully that’s just publishing copy and  in no way reflects the quality of the writing inside? I remain very wary. I feel like this has the potential to be gobsmackingly good or just abysmally train-wreck awful. Either way, I’ll likely be buying and reading it and expect a review come October.

Picture credit: The Debutantes by Marta Aronssohn-Danzig (c1889); nothing to do with anything, really, I just like the look on their faces: “really Jess?, you’re talking about Carson McCullers again? Sigh.”

• Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir
• Borstal Boy by Brendan Behan
• The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers by Virginia Spencer Carr
• The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
• The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Liana by Martha Gellhorn
• Katherine Anne Porter: A Life by Joan Givner
• The Ghostly Lover by Elizabeth Hardwick
• The Simple Truth by Elizabeth Hardwick
• Pentimento by Lillian Hellman
• Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman
• An Unfinished Woman by Lillian Hellman
• Conversations with Katherine Anne Porter: Refugee from Indian Creek by Enrique Hank Lopez
• Peyton Place by Grace Metalious
• The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings by Katherine Anne Porter
• In Pursuit of Hygiene by Helen Razer
• Beautiful Exile: The Life of Martha Gellhorn by Carl Rollyson
• Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy by Carl Rollyson
• With Fondest Regards by Françoise Sagan
• Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel

And then, yes, that’s just my loot from during the week, there was Clunes. I came well under budget, spending much less than I thought I would. It was a great day, lovely surrounds and buildings, a good vibe, a few friendly dogs and lots of books.  Here’s my haul:

• The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
• God’s Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell [review]
• Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
• Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
• The Thief’s Journal by Jean Genet
• Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps by Emmett Grogan
• Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley
• From Here to Eternity by James Jones
• Lonesome Traveler by Jack Kerouac
• The Penguin Book of New American Voices edited by Jay McInerney
• The Group by Mary McCarthy
• Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
• A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
• A House for Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
• The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark
• The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark
• Not to Disturb by Muriel Spark
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
• The Public Image by Muriel Spark
• The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
• Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath by Anne Stevenson
• The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima by Henry Scott Stokes
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

And, a few interesting articles from the week:

• Literary Characters and Their Modern-Day Tabloid Counterparts by Bailey Kennedy
• Faking Nice in the Blogosphere: Women and Book Reviews by Sarah McCarry (A must read, in my opinion.)
• Mae at Mad Bibliophile has written up a summary of her day at Clunes, including a photograph of the pony in a local front yard. (!)
• Does Twitter Sell Books? Our Quasi-Scientific Study by Paul Young

Less than a week until Clunes! To keep you happily distracted while I work out my game plan (seriously, what would be the ideal method for carrying my new books around – I’ve considered getting one of those granny shopping carts and pimping it up a bit! That’d be so badass, even if I was the only one that thought so.) for next weekend:

• The BBC asks: Were the mad heroines of literature really sane?
• On literature’s influence upon musicians:

“When the private world of reading and the public world of performance mesh happily, all parties benefit: musicians appearing cerebral, writers appearing hip, readers and listeners feeling smart.”

• A romantic look at the independent bookstore in the digital age, some of the reasons put forward here are the same that were espoused upon the emergence of digital music versus record stores; comments like this:

“Independent bookstores remain a sensual and social experience that will be tough to replace. Going to a bookstore is as much about physically browsing. As smart as Amazon’s ‘Customer’s Who Bought This Item Also Bought’ metadata is, it’s no replacement for mooching around the fiction section and skimming novels yourself. Or the serendipitous eye-catching of a face-out cover or flipping through several books without laggy downloads.”

• are eerily similar to what we were saying about the physical aspects of music less than ten years ago, you know, incessant whining about cover art and whatnot. While I agree with the sentiment, ignoring the realities and implications of a changing business landscape isn’t going to help the future of the physical bookstore.
• The Miles Franklin Award shortlist was announced during the week (almost tempted to try and read all of the nominated novels, I’m still contemplating it.) and Alex Miller had a few choice words to say about the lack of relevance of the literary award.

¹ Speaking of Abebooks, do you think of it as Abe, as in Abe Simpson, Abe Lincoln, and all those other famous Abes; or A.B.E.? I’ve always thought of it as Abe, but I was speaking to a more experienced bookseller this week and he referred to it as A.B.E. and my whole world fell apart. But, then I got to talk at length to a little kid about the upcoming Iron Man film and then I was okay again.

• Capone: Life Behind Bars at Alcatraz by Mark Douglas Brown
• Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland
• The Adventures of Tintin: Tintin in America by Hergé
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
• Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson
• The Noticeably Stouter QI Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson
• Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson [review]

My Mum returned from the U.S.A. this week and she brought with her a bounty of gifts, including the Tintin and Capone books above. The Capone book looks really fascinating, stuffed with actual documents from the gangster’s time at Alcatraz. She also visited the set of Gilmore Girls at Warner Brothers Studio, which was exciting enough when she was telling me all about it, but then she pulled out a t-shirt with the logo for Luke’s Diner on it – I may have cried a little bit. As well as all this, she took a passing snapshot of the famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco for me, what a champ!

It’s been a really strange week. Two bouts of sickness that hit me out of nowhere, and a major computer malfunction thanks to Microsoft which meant I had to completely reinstall Windows and reformat everything. Luckily nothing was lost, but it was still a bit of a pain. The week wasn’t all bad news though, I found out that I’m going to be getting more hours and new responsibilities at the bookstore from next week. Always good, and hopefully it means a big paycheck due just in time for Clunes.

• Lapham’s Quarterly look at who was under the influence of what while they were writing.
• We all heard about the Pulitzer Prize winners this week, and the Wall Street Journal takes a look at how a small, independent publisher managed to take out the coveted prize for fiction with Paul Harding’s Tinkers.
• A 1992 survey on the sex life of librarians, and if inspired by some of the statistics from there, some choice pick up lines for use on the information professional object of your desire.
• It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned Carson McCullers here, hasn’t it? Well, Lauren Rosen is directing a film adaptation of my favourite Carson short story “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” and CSU’s Carson McCullers Center has some behind the scenes photographs.
• I’ve been thinking about getting an Ex Libris stamp made – I don’t know, one of those whims that I probably won’t follow through on, but found a selection of historically interesting bookplates.

[image credit: "This Year's Summer Reading" by flickr user ephemera assemblyman]

Next week I’ll be seeing Henry Rollins in Melbourne, which I’m very excited about. A battered copy of the Portable Henry Rollins got me through much of my university years. I saw him do his spoken word thing a few years ago, and it was such a riot; funny, though-provoking, unapologetic about his anger. Definitely looking forward to seeing him again, and it feels like I’m in the right headspace for it too. Also I’ll be seeing the Mountain Goats next week, who were featured in John Green’s Paper Towns [review here], which is perhaps a tenuous literary link, but a literary link nonetheless!

I don’t even have a list of links to share this week, but I did come across these very cute retro library posters, so hopefully they’ll be enough for you to forgive my slackness.

[Image credits: flickr user VB library, and be sure to check out their amazing set of 1960s library posters.]

Now that Easter has passed, it’s time to begin looking forward to that other huge event: Clunes Booktown. In the first weekend of May, an entire small country town converts into a book lovers haven and all of the historic buildings are given over to booksellers and their wares. Books, good food, clean country air, it’s really a very special and unique event. A few hints from a seasoned Booktowner (ahem, I went for the first time last year): there is no mobile phone reception in the town, so if you’re attending with others make sure to have planned meeting spots/times to avoid confusion and frustration. Or learn how to send smoke signals. Also, if you go on the Sunday, by late afternoon some of the booksellers are desperate to get rid of their remaining stock and will start selling BOXES of books for spare change.

It’s very unlikely that I’ll have any new acquisitions to post about in these Loot posts until the end of the Clunes weekend, but luckily there’s still some good readin’ on the internet:

• According to a study funded by a chocolate company, reading can help reduce stress.
• Emma Thompson revealed that Jane Austen helped her through a post-divorce depression, and Jezebel compiled a therapeutic reading list. Any reading suggestions for those subject to frequent lapses of self-esteem and battles through loathing, doubt and fear would be much appreciated. For a friend of a friend, of course.
• Dumb Little Man offers some advice on why and how you should find time to read.
• Stuart Evers at the Guardian ponders brand loyalty in readers.
• Curious Pages is a fun look into the weird and wonderful world of old childrens books.